Monday, June 16, 2014

Cat burglar now too fat to catch rodents has turned to easier prey

Dawn Palmer from Burnaby in British Columbia, Canada, has a mystery on her hands.
A few months back, she started noticing workmen's gloves showing up on the floor of her home. Nylon ones, fabric ones, never in a matched pair, just singles - and they were found in the dining room, the back balcony and around the front door of her South Slope home.
Assuming they belonged to her son, Palmer simply left them in his room and thought little of it.
"Then I thought, 'Wait a minute, there's too many of them,' " Palmer said.

Her son decided to count the gloves, and dumped a bag of them on the living room floor - that's when the family realized there was something strange happening. There were just too many gloves.
I kept thinking this doesn't make sense," Palmer said, suspecting their family dog was up to something.
It wasn't until a day or two later that the Palmers finally figured out who was leaving the gloves. Sienna, the family cat, had a history of bringing home "presents" for her owners and would announce their delivery with attention-demanding meows.

"Sienna does her 'mew, mew, I'm here, and I have a gift for you,' and she's standing right in front of the glove, and I'm like, 'I can't believe this, you are the glove bandit!'" Palmer said.
The Palmers have had Sienna for years, and when the feline was younger, she would bring home gifts: birds, rats, mice and moles, for instance.
"I was in India, and my daughter sent me an email (photo) of a rat floating in our toilet," Palmer said chuckling. "I was laughing hysterically because obviously she just dropped it in there. She loves to give us gifts, that's what they do."

But Sienna is aging and has put on a few pounds, so Palmer suspects the gloves are easy "prey" for the calico.
"Seriously, I think because she's too fat now and can't catch anything, she's picked up this glove thing," Palmer says, laughing. "I'm just so happy it's not mice and birds anymore. ... I would hate it when she brought them home."
Palmer estimates Sienna has brought in more than 50 gloves in total and counting.
"She's still doing it! Every two days now, I find another one. Now I just throw them in the bag," she says. "One day, I had the gloves in the bag, and I was holding the bag, and she's meowing at me, as if to say: 'Those are mine.' It's too funny."